Sir John Lavery - Miss Auras, The Red Book (ca. 1900)
On the supposed freedom bestowed upon the reader by hypertext:
Coover states that hypertext "presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author," but his tonal matter-of-factness belies the monumentality of the assertion. This "domination by the author" has been, at least until now, the point of writing and reading. The author masters the resources of language to create a vision that will engage and in some way overpower the reader; the reader goes to the work to be subjected to the creative will of another. The premise behind the textual interchange is that the author possesses wisdom, an insight, a way of looking at experience, that the reader wants. (Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, 1994, p. 163)
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